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BEIJING, Aug. 20-- Net profits of China's commercial banks tumbled in the first half of 2020, an uncommon decline analysts say echoed the country's efforts to wield financial instruments to sustain the real economy amid mounting pressure due to COVID-19. In the Jan.-June period, the country's commercial banks saw net profits slide 9.4 percent year on year to 1 trillion yuan (about 144.93 billion U.S. dollars) with average return on assets at 0.83 percent, down 0.15 percentage points from the end of the first quarter, data by the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) showed. "It is very rare in recent years," said Dong Ximiao, a researcher with the National Institution for Finance and Development. "But the fall was not due to worsening operational capability of commercial banks, but the result of intensified endeavor to share profits with the real economy." As the epidemic kept weighing on the world's second largest economy, China has taken a slew of measures to lower financing costs for enterprises in the real economy and help them tide over difficulties. In the first half, the country's new yuan-denominated loans expanded to 12.09 trillion yuan, up 2.42 trillion yuan year on year, official data showed. Such loans mainly went to industries including infrastructure, technology and innovation, small and micro businesses, said Guo Shuqing, chairman of the CBIRC, adding that the newly-added loans in the manufacturing sector set a record this year, on par with the total number of the past four years. | 
